Posted on 08/23/2018 6:52:54 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Tesla reported second quarter results earlier this month. Despite losing $718 million during the quarter, Tesla shares rose 16 percent on renewed promises of profitability. Driven by government incentives and mandates, world automakers have announced big electric car introduction plans. But will any electric car firm be able to make money?
Start-up automobile companies face long odds. Over the last 10 years, Tesla posted cumulative losses of over $3 billion. In the second quarter, Tesla began to ramp production of its new Model 3 sedan, producing more than 50,000 cars. Tesla also promises to attain profitability in the near future, but the firm is about to face rapidly growing electric car competition.
World auto makers have not only embraced electric cars, but now appear to be competing to introduce the most electric models. More than 400 fully electric or hybrid electric vehicles have been announced. BMW plans to introduce 12 all electric and 13 hybrids into its lineup by 2025. Ford announced an $11 billion investment, 16 fully electric, and 24 plug-in hybrid electric cars by 2022. Toyota, Volkswagen, General Motors, and others appear to be all in for electrics.
Hybrid electric vehicles, such as the Toyota Prius, use a conventional internal combustion engine along with an electric motor system to improve mileage. Hybrids can’t be plugged-in and charged. After ten years of production, Toyota was finally able to turn a profit on the hybrid Prius. Hybrid electric cars, which do not suffer the range limitation of fully electric cars, grew to about three percent of global vehicle sales in 2017.
Plug-in hybrid electrics, such as the Chevrolet Volt, can plug-in and run wholly on electric batteries but also use a gasoline engine for longer trips.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Not if Tesla is the model followed
Yes, if you turn the world into a giant golf course.
Not until there is a rapid charging standard and infrastructure.
Until then, electric cars are a niche market.
Yes, if they are ...not electric?
Nuclear power. Fast battery pack swaps, instead of charging for hours.
Yeah. It is possible. Barely.
Not until you can drive 400 miles, stop for 15 minutes and drive 400 more miles. I don’t see that happening.
Not if recharge time remains in the hours instead of a few minutes.
NO !!!
Next question.
The electric cars today are too large and expensive. Cheap will make them ubiquitous. "Cadillacs" are not required. A well engineered, small, Mercedes that is inexpensive should do very well.
The successful electric vehicles will be limited to urban areas and short drives. There may be a real market among young woment who can make the purchase and arrange the financing and home delivery from their I phones.
Conventional battery powered cars will never be the future, for a host of reasons.
If the internal combustion engine is phased out, and it just might, a graphene based hydrogen powered car will ultimately replace it.
I think of it this way. The incandescent light bulb has been around for about a century. The every thought the CFL bulb would replace the incandescent, except that the LED was a far superior product. It turns out that the CFL bulb, like electric cars, was merely a bridge to the more advanced and better LED and hydrogen based car.
Invented in the 1800’s and just as good today ,LOL
As Telsa is learning it is difficult to build a large number of cars. The mainline car companies have decades of experience build cars, adding electrical power units is not that difficult. But learning to build a large number of cars is a little bit harder.
Musk needs to hire car guys and give them the authority to get Telsa's production up to the current standards. This is not the 1910's when Henry Ford or the Dodge brothers could single handed run a car company. Musk did all of us a great service developing the electrical power unit, but technology is easily transferable. Musk is an innovator and that's where he needs to focus his energy.
“Not if recharge time remains in the hours instead of a few minutes.”
And we should also note that hybrids aren’t electric cars. They are powered only by gasoline
Let's get real...
There are plugin hybrids which have 100% electric modes, and can fall back to gasoline if powers runs low.
Without doing any research on hybrids (I am not in the market for any auto right now), it would seem to me that the issue of recharging would be moot if the design of the propulsion system followed the model that is used in locomotives.
The wheels are driven by electric motors and a small ICE is used to keep the battery(s?) charged. So gas stops would still be needed but they would take only a few minutes.
I suppose a charging system could be used for when the battery goes completely dead.
Battery technology has to advance first.
Solar panels that can be painted on vehicles would be cool. It’s the premise for how I plan to save the world from global warming.
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